The Ion Storm team was showing off their new Action/Adventure/RPG on the Eidos booth and we managed to coax them into giving us a tour of the game.

Deus Ex 2 is being developed by the same core developers at Ion Storm, with Warren Spector as Executive Producer and Harvey Smith as the project lead. In Deus Ex 2 you play as a clone of J.C. Denton, the hero of the original game, about 20 years after the events of Deus Ex took place.

The biggest thing about Deus Ex 2 is the physics engine that the game will use. The game will allow you to interact with almost every item in the game and each item will respond realistically and make the appropriate shadows on the background. Shadows will play a bigger role in Deus Ex 2 than the original since the realistic shadows will make stealth much harder to pull off. The shadows will also scale in size according to where the actual object is located in the foreground and any change of lighting will affect the shadows in a realistic manner.

As for the nano-augmentations that was present in Deus Ex, they're back full force in this game as well. Deus Ex 2 will forego the character stat building that is present in most RPGs and instead will be more focused on making sure that each upgrade to the augmentations bring about a noticeable effect. A number of powerful augs will only be available on the black market but will be coupled with a negative effect to balance out the aug.

Deus Ex 2 will also feature idle chatter from the NPCs. There is reportedly over 30,000 lines of dialogue for this feature alone which will be said depending on what's happening. This feature will be heavily scripted and the dialogue will be able to call for backup, determine which direction the player went, the player's sex, the location, and even some random musings that have no impact on the game at all.

While Deus Ex 2 will be a shorter game with less locations to explore, there will be more things to do in each area. The storyline will branch drastically depending on how you play, which means that the endings will depend on more than the one choice you made at the end of the original game.

Deus Ex 2 is being developed simultaneously for both the XBox and the PC, which will ensure that both versions look stunning and the control scheme for the XBox be comfortable and easy to use. In fact, the entire demonstration was done on the XBox version of the game, and all movements with the controller seemed to be seamless. When asked about a PS2 version of the game being planned, I was told that the limited power of the PS2 will make such an effort difficult.

Ion Storm is shooting for a 2003 release for Deus Ex 2.

While Eidos was also showing off the Legend of Legaia 2 on their booths, it was impossible to find anyone who actually knew anything about the game. The only thing that was clear from playing the game was that it plays almost exactly like the original game, only with better graphics and sound.